


Side Line

by Arsenic, arsenicarcher (Arsenic)



Series: 14 Valentines [41]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2020-11-07 14:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20819150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/arsenicarcher
Summary: Mary has her own way of fighting.  Written for the women and war theme for 14 2012.





	Side Line

It hadn’t been what had kept them together, but Mary knew she’d fallen in love with Stephen because he’d been the first man she’d ever looked at whose eyes hadn’t reminded her of the war. Stephen had served, and later, much later, Mary would be privy to his nightmares, to the memories he refused to lose even as he wanted to, but he had made the choice to set his sights on new things, give himself something to see beyond bloodshed, and Mary had needed that more than she had needed anything else.

*

Mary’d had three brothers. Two of them had been younger, not so much so that she’d been like a second ma to them, or anything, but she certainly had darned socks, bandaged scraped knees and baked cakes for birthdays. For the youngest, Samuel, she’d known nights where she’d squeezed next to him in bed, nearly pushing David, a year older than Samuel, out. David grumbled, but Mary persisted, holding Samuel through the nightmares he’d had as a child.

They’d sat on the porch the night he turned sixteen. She was almost twenty by that time, narrowly missing spinsterhood by the fact that the war had taken most eligible bachelors in its unyielding grip. Samuel said, “Don’t tell Pa, but I’m scared something fierce.”

Mary suspected Pa knew, he always knew more than he let on. She knew for a fact Ma was the wiser. She didn’t mention either of these things. Instead, she said, “Remember when I was twelve, and you were just eight, but already as tall as me?”

He looked at her and she continued. “The Ralston boys used to give me such trouble on the way to school and they were older than both of us, but you just stood up to them as though it wasn’t anything.”

“I was eight, Mary. I didn’t have any idea about consequences.”

“No, but you knew right and wrong,” she told him softly. “You still do. And knowing the consequences, being naturally afraid of them doesn’t make you weak. Being willing to take a risk for what is right, _that_ makes you brave.”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” Samuel admitted quietly. Mary was not sure she was meant to have heard.

In the fields behind the house laid a still-settling mound, a cross at its top. Carter, her oldest brother, who had pulled her hair and called her names and made her cry more than a few times, was buried beneath. He had also gone to barn dances he would have preferred to skip just so she could dance, helped her learn to read, and was the funniest person Mary had ever known or was likely to know. She told Samuel loudly, “I wish that, too.”

*

By the time news reached their town regarding the war, it was almost always weeks late. Mary dutifully wrote it up for the town circular, helping Mr. Friedberg get the circulars printed and dispersed in a timely manner. The losses she wrote about were all too real, too close—Isaac Dunsten from two doors down, Cole Billingsley who’d sat next to her in the schoolhouse, and Ronnie Lowing who’d played jacks with David from the time the two of them were old enough to sit up—and somehow not close enough.

Writing about it, cutting bandages, sending packages filled with whatever treats the family could spare and some they couldn’t, even tending to the boys who were “lucky” enough to be sent home, limbs missing or mangled, was more than Mary wanted and nowhere on the map of what she desired. She wanted fresh stories. She wanted stories that were real and from the mouths of soldiers. She wanted the stories that big city newspapers were not telling.

She sat, sometimes, with Timothy Manners, his right arm gone from the elbow down. She helped him with his letters, working with his left hand, not flinching when he got frustrated and threw the pencil or yelled at her about how she was a no-good busybody. She sat when he was calm and she asked, “Would it hurt, to talk about it?”

He said, “Terribly.”

She nodded and didn’t press, because he wasn’t part of her job, wasn’t part of a story she was going to write to let people see destruction in print even if they couldn’t in blood.

After a moment, he said, “But I think it might be best to do so.”

Mary listened, attentive and compassionate and later, wasting perfectly good candle wax, she documented Timothy’s suffering and courage, his reality. For now it was something, like being part of the bigger world, having something to say about that world. First steps were no less important than third or fourth or fifth steps.


End file.
